Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ankita Dhyani Click/Tap on the image to try my chatbot on Facebook Messenger!

What is a chatbot?

Chatbot is a program that can perform a human-like conversation via text. It engages with the user by identifying input words/phrases and replying with per-defined responses to create a feeling of empathy.

Here is an amazing article by Matt Schlicht, if you want to learn more about chatbots.

What inspired me to design a chatbot?

I believe in seizing an opportunity to learn something new. Being an active reader at Medium, I came across trending articles on Conversational UI and how chatbot is hot topic in Silicon Valley. Writings about users ditching regular apps and spending most of their time on chat messengers, further intrigued me into the topic of artificial intelligence and chatbots. Theodora, my colleague at StudyPortals is also interested in this topic and shared some incredible inspirations.

After spending hours reading about chatbots, its pros and cons, I felt the only way I could extend my knowledge is by getting hands on experience. My next step was to search for a platform, that allows me to focus on the conversational experience without worrying about technology.

About Chatfuel

Chatfuel, is an easy to use web app that helps in creating chatbot that live in Facebook messenger. After going through simple tutorials available in the dashboard of Chatfuel, within minutes I could get going. As a chatbot can be for entertainment or functional purpose, I decided to experiment designing a bot for my personal avatar.

My process

The goal of the bot was to introduce the user to me and provide an effortless way to get in touch. Since the bot will be representing me, I was clear that it should talk in a casual and friendly tone! As the visual part of the experience was dependent on the platform (Chatfuel), it was easy to fixate my attention on the conversational details.

To create the flow of the bot, I designed a sitemap with distinct if and else situations.

Sitemap for my chatbot

Once I had a clear structure, I started detailing the experience by writing script for the conversation. To keep the architecture of the bot clean, I switched to excel. This helped me to easily keep track of what a block describes and where it links further.

Excel helped in maintaining a clean architecture for my chatbot!

Things to consider while designing a chatbot

The key to designing a chatbot is to make the conversations as human like as possible. For instance, we prefer not to repeat ourselves or suddenly jump to unrelated topics, so the flow in a conversation plays an important role. The easiest way to guide the user into our chat flow, is by suggesting the types of replies we hope to get. Another crucial factor that helps to make the talk more human, is by keeping it simple and not mixing too many things together. In short, Keep It Simple, Silly!

To conclude I should say, I truly enjoyed the process of talking to myself. Give it a try and talk to my chatbot on facebook messenger, also let me know what you think!

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Designing my first chatbot with Chatfuel was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designing my first chatbot with Chatfuel

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